


You Don't Know Where Your Interest Lies

by Todesengel



Series: Overs-verse [6]
Category: Voltron: Lion Voltron
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-05
Updated: 2007-04-05
Packaged: 2017-10-22 16:09:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Todesengel/pseuds/Todesengel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Lance-induced stress ulcer, a hostile armada parked on his doorstep, and a sense of impending doom. For Keith, that's pretty much status quo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Don't Know Where Your Interest Lies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mendax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mendax/gifts).



Keith slung a leg over the armrest of the chair and tapped out a cigarette. He rolled it between his thumb and two fingers before lighting it. The plastic covering the package made small crinkled noises when he put it back in his pocket, and heavens above he still had no clue as to why he'd started smoking menthols – and Lights to boot -- except that maybe it had something to do with the way the smoke roiled in his stomach, making him feel sick and queasy, like he'd felt that time he'd had his first cigarette in the back of a bar he was _definitely_ too young to be in. A half-assed attempt at remembering a half-assed attempt, and that, really, was the definition of his life. Half-assed.

Keith blew smoke rings at the ghosts of never-quite-managing, and he wondered how much of what he was – what he'd become – had been as the result of never actually following anything except the path of least resistance. And wouldn't that be the biggest kicker of all? That he'd become, arguably, one of the best soldiers the Alliance had ever managed to snag, and it was all because he couldn't ever manage to escape the gravity-well of shutting up and yes-siring and not once saying, "Y'know, Dad, I really think that I want to be a florist when I grow up."

How much of his life was the direct result of the guilt he carried around every day – the guilt of not managing to live up to an impossible standard he'd created after having all the crap about duty and honor and courage that he'd had drilled into his head from the day he was born until he lived, breathed, thought, hated, loved, needed all of that?

"And how much of it is just because you're a lazy, fucking coward Keith?" he asked himself with a snort of mingled self-mocking and disgust because, fuck, he was too old for this 'my parents screwed me up' angst. Life, he had learned in the intervening years between eighteen and that last big fight he'd had with the old man – not over anything substantive, oh no, because that wasn't the way things were done in their family – and this small, dusty turret in a castle that lost bits whenever the wind blew too hard, was nothing more than a series of choices, and when all was said and done, he was the only person responsible for the choices made and the paths taken.

Still, it was sometimes nice to think of that smoky bar, and the man with the salt-and-pepper beard who'd bought him whiskey – golden and harsh – and given him cigarettes and had promised a life of art and beauty and history and he'd been tempted, so very, very tempted. A dusty night a lifetime ago, and the promise of what might have been, and so maybe Keith liked to play his little game of "This isn't my life and I'm not really here" a bit more than was perhaps healthy, but Keith would like to see any of the head doctors who'd say shit like that cope with his team for more than two weeks straight without practicing some serious escapism. If it wasn't Allura and Coran coming to him – yet again – with their unshakeable and completely mistaken belief that he was the conduit to the Big Brass and if they pestered him enough he'd somehow manage to magically conjure up half of the Alliance armada, it was Lance asking to be deployed off-planet for a week or two – "just until the angry mob goes away Keith, that's all, and I swear, this time I thought I made the whole one-night stand concept perfectly clear."

Trust Lance to introduce the concepts of the 'nooner' and free love to a planet full of angry, scared, heavily armed refugees who made the puritans look like two dollar whores when it came to their views on extra-marital sex.

His cigarette had burned down to almost nothing, and Keith was tempted to use the embers to light up a second one, to settle down low in this really uncomfortable chair and close his eyes and just be…empty for a little while.

He actually did light the second cig, managed to take two puffs before the guilt wormed its way back to the forefront of his stubbornly full mind, and he carefully snuffed the cigarette and put the unsmoked remnant back in the box. Half-assed, that's what he was, half-assed about everything, even something as stupid and simple as going off for a couple of hours and having a smoke.

Keith fingered the packet in his pocket, ran his thumb down the creases that outlined his last few cigarettes.

Half-assed, and look what it'd got him: nowhere, nothing and no one, stranded in the deepest of bumfuck space, spinning his wheels in a war he'd gotten stuck in, and smoking mentholated lights in a disused room because it was better than trying to go to sleep with the weight of a planet just barely scraping along lying across his shoulders.

Keith made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a grunt – all disgust and annoyance, because even if he did go about things with quite a bit less than his all and everything, he was still better than this. Or he should have been better than this, because this – his life – was just pathetic. Alone and wasting his time and – okay, yes, the lions were pretty cool, but he should've seen what he was doing sooner, should've seen that he was just dicking around, playing a goddamn white knight while all around him people were dying and –

Half-assed. He'd always done things half-assed.

Keith pulled the half-smoked cigarette out of the pack and stuck it between his lips. The scratch of the match on the wall was loud in the dusty quiet, the smell of sulfur and smoke temporarily covering up the ground in mustiness. Keith sucked in a lungful of smoke, exhaled it in a slow, steady plume.

Well. It was time to put an end to all that.

*

See, the thing is, it's easy enough to say you're going to do something, that you're going to change who you are or who you think you are at any rate, and a heck of a lot harder to actually _do_ anything, and Keith knew that, he really did, which was why he had no clue how he'd ended up here, in Lance's room, his hands so very not shaking as he finished buttoning up his shirt. Because in his long, detailed master-plan of change, fucking Lance boneless had been way down on the list; way, way, _way_ down, because Keith was methodical and he'd figured he'd start with something small like switching from lights to regulars, and sort of work his way up.

"Damn," Lance said, slow and drawn out, and he sounded exactly the same as he had that one time he'd taken the moonshine and opiates he'd cooked up in O-Chem. Sweet, and golden, and he'd looked like he was looking into the face of god and the heavens, a face full of peace and understanding, like everything Zen made into flesh. As Keith recalled, Lance had rather quickly lost that look once the stomach pumping had begun, and he'd been everything but beautiful then, shaky and pale, smelling of sweat and vomit and charcoal, but in that moment when he'd reflected the glory of a universe unfolding, Lance had been the most beautiful thing that Keith had ever seen, and Keith knew that if he turned around now, and looked at Lance, he'd just fuck him into the bed again, and pleasant as that thought was it wouldn't do him any good in figuring out how to minimize the damage from his previous act of monumental stupidity. He might not know the specifics of just how bad this could get, but he had no doubt in his mind that it would be bad because even as he was very calmly freaking out (an ability that had stood him in good stead many a time) he knew that no matter how good he was feeling, this thing – this fucking Lance into the mattress thing – was a mistake. He wasn't ready for this, because he'd wanted this for so long and he'd kept himself from having it, and now that it was here, all slow and boneless and sated and thoroughly screwed on the bed behind him, he was going to fuck it up. He was going to fuck it up because he was stupid and vulnerable and he couldn't stop second-guessing himself, couldn't stop himself from going around and being all half-assed about everything, and he knew from long, hard earned experience, that the only way to keep Lance from running rough-shod over him was to be utterly and absolutely certain of his own mind and leave no openings for Lance to worm in and exploit. Lance needed everything or nothing at all, and Keith knew that right now his best offer fell short of everything by a goodly bit. Not good enough, not by a long shot, and half-assed though Keith was, the half of him that actually gave a damn knew that bad things happened when Lance was allowed to run free, when there wasn't something there to keep him from leaping headlong into something he should have taken a good long look at first.

Keith smoothed down the front of his shirt, and he almost wished his hands _were_ shaking, because then he could focus on that instead of the twisted, anxious feeling in his gut. He turned, slowly, trying to figure out what to say around the panic screaming in his head because his brother had somehow managed to skip the 'what to say after you've had sex with the guy you think may be the love of your life when you're pretty sure that he just thinks of you as another casual fuck' talk and if Keith ever got back home he was going to have some serious discussions with Will about his failings as an older brother and in the meantime he still needed something to say before he did something insanely stupid like saying, "Lance, I love you, and I'll do anything you want if you say you love me back."

"Stop fucking the locals," Keith said, instead, and he shut his mouth with a hard _snap_ to keep himself from saying anything else.

"What?" Lance looked up at him, all big eyes full of doped-out confusion, and Keith bit the tip of his tongue to keep it from betraying him.

"Allura's getting complaints," he said, eyes focused on a spot three inches to the left of Lance's head. "And then I get complaints, and that makes me less than happy." Keith tugged on his collar, and, okay, he could do this, he could make it through the next five minutes. "So. Stop fucking the locals, okay?"

"Keith—" Lance said, low and soft and drawn out, tequila and salt, smoke and years in an oaken cask, and yeah, that was it, the breaking point, because god his post-sex voice should be illegal, and Keith was out of the room and down the hall before his libido could overrule his common sense and get him in deeper than he already was.

*

Keith lay in bed, staring at the off-white ceiling and wishing for a cigarette with the desperate urgency of the addict, and thought, slow and languid and trying to reconstruct the free-wheeling fragments of his mind, _Okay._

He wasn't sure if it really was better knowing how exactly he'd gotten to this point –- in bed with Lance, again, even though he still wasn't ready for this, no where near ready, although at this point that really didn't seem to matter. After all, it wasn't like knowing _how_ this had happened was going to stop it from happening again. Keith knew his limitations and he knew that unless he got a good head start he'd never be able to resist Lance ambushing him in a corridor and growling "are you trying to fucking kill me?" and even if Keith hadn't known that that was Lance-speak for "please fuck me" the knee-wobbling kiss Lance had planted on him immediately after his little pronouncement would have told anyone exactly what Lance wanted.

 _Okay,_ Keith thought again, only this time it wasn't with overtones of a stunned-bunny still wrapped up in a post-sex haze. _Okay,_ and he shifted on the bed as a prelude to leaving.

"Oh no," Lance said, and he grabbed Keith's arm. "No way. If this only happens every eight months then I'm going to need more than just one roll in the sack."

"Lance, I've got meetings, work –"

"Yeah, and I'm giving you a perfect excuse to get out of 'em."

And Keith was tempted, he really was, because Lance was leaving a trail of dry kisses down Keith's stomach and eight months was eight months, after all. And he wanted to stay, he really did, except, except, except.

Except he was doing it again, wiffiling, and he was supposed to be stopping that.

"Lance," he said, and he pushed Lance away. "Seriously. Stop."

Keith had never really bought into the whole 'you can tell a person's character by gazing into their eyes' thing. Eyes didn't mean shit. It was the face that gave everything away, the little muscles twitches of emotions being stifled, and Lance had always had a very readable face – hell, Lance was just plain bad at hiding _anything_ \-- and so Keith didn't know what to do when Lance looked up at him with an inscrutable face, and said, "Okay. I'll take a rain check."

*

Lance cashed in his rain check two days later, in among the dusty old books that Keith was becoming all too familiar with. A blowjob, messy and unexpected and Keith had his fingers tangled in Lance's hair before he realized that this wasn't a pleasant – and oddly vivid – daydream.

"Holy shit," he managed to say after he came, heart pounding and the fingers still all twisted up in Lance's hair trembled – unsure, and shaken, just like he was. He took a deep breath and looked down at Lance who looked back at him, smug and self-satisfied; a cat with canary feathers sticking out of his mouth. "What the hell was that?"

"Rain check," Lance said, and he left before Keith could offer to give him a blowjob in return.

Keith stared at the place Lance had been and to be honest he'd actually been hoping that Lance's 'rain check' would have lasted a bit longer and possibly included something more than a sloppy blowjob that left his dick hanging in the wind.

A week and a half later, he was pressed up against a wall in a rarely used corridor – cobwebs this time, and the stale air of neglect – and Lance's hands were down his pants and around his cock and Lance was muttering obscenities into his ear and slowly rocking himself against Keith's hip and the last time Keith had had sex like this he'd been sixteen and Sven had just dumped him and he'd gotten stupid drunk and it had been with a complete stranger in a dank back alley full of garbage and stray cats that yowled in a distinctly smug and leering fashion. Not exactly an image conducive to being in the proper frame of mind for a fast-and-dirty handjob, and a large part of why Keith was so good at his job was because he wasn't afraid to fight dirty and use whatever tools were at hand, so he managed to reroute enough blood back up to his brain to grab Lance's wrist and squeeze until Lance let go.

"What the fuck?"

"Rain check," Lance said.

"You already used that one."

"No, see, you owe me for a _lot_ of sex. And maybe in your severely undersexed world a blowjob in the stacks counts as 'a lot of sex' but out here in reality you've still got miles to go before you sleep."

"Lance I don't think –" he began and Lance sighed and took his hand out of Keith's pants and that actually kind of sucked although Keith would never, ever, ever admit it.

"Look," Lance said, serious in a way that Keith had never seen him be before, "the way I see it, you've got two viable options. One, you can have about a month of massive amounts of frenzied sex with me right now and then go back to your sad, lonely, undersexed nights for the next six months until I can't take it anymore and you need to fuck me again before I go out and rape a fucking tree or something, or two, instead of having a concentrated frenzy of sex we could spread it out to just sex on a regular basis. Personally, I'd take option number two."

"So, what," Keith said because he figured he had to say _something_ even though his headspace was all topsy-turvey at the moment, "we'd have, like, a schedule for sex?"

"Would that help?" Lance said, and it was his honest earnestness that made Keith look at him like he'd lost his mind. "No, seriously, would that make it easier for you? Because you just say the word and I'll go out and buy a fucking day planner and we can sit down and pencil in all of the times that it's most convenient for you to have sex because I don't think I could survive too many dry spells."

"You're insane," Keith said. He needed words and space and Lance rolling his eyes and going off in a huff because it sounded too good. It was Lance coming to him on his terms, and it was everything he wanted and Keith was always instinctively wary of receiving anything he wanted. "You're absolutely insane."

"Nine o'clock: stop Doom invasion," Lance said, grinning, getting into this now. "Nine-thirty: wild gay monkey sex. See? It'll work just fine. And then, y'know, you'll have an excuse for getting out of meetings you don't want to be in because, hey! Prior commitment and all."

"And what if I choose option number three, which is to ignore both your options and confine you to barracks until this whole thing is over and we're all back home?"

"Yeah, sure, like you'd do that. Let's be honest here, okay? We're strangers in a strange land, cut off from civilization and stranded for who knows how long and neither you nor I ever managed to get the hang of the whole liking girly parts thing and while you might be content with never having sex again, we both know that I'm a horn-dog and I really wasn't joking about the whole raping a tree thing because I was _this close_ to doing just that. Look, I'm not looking for a relationship here. We've already got a relationship. You're my best friend, I trust you with my life, you're the best goddamn lay I've ever had, and the last thing in the world I want to do is marry you because that'd probably screw everything else up and I _like_ all that other stuff. I don't want romance. I don't _need_ romance. I'd just like to get laid on a regular basis, and laid spectacularly by the way, and, y'know, go home some day."

"Shit. Lance –"

"No, no way. You don't get to push me off with rules and regs, Keith. It's sex, not a relationship, and if you think that sleeping with me will make it any harder for you to order me to do something suicidal then you're monumentally stupid. Biological urges trump S.O.P. and you know that."

"Don't I get some time to think about this?"

"Sure. I can give you five minutes," Lance said and he slid his hands back down Keith's pants.

"Not helping, Lance."

Keith could feel Lance grin against his neck. "Wasn't supposed to."

*

In all honesty, Keith expected the whole thing to last around six months, a year tops, because he was pretty sure that Lance and Sven were like penguins or something – mated for life and all that, even though Sven had gone and gotten married – and it was really only a matter of time before the two of them got their heads out of their asses and got back together and then this whole dysfunctional relationship he was having with Lance would end. Throughout that entire first year Keith kept expecting Lance to come up to him one day and say, "hey, it was fun, but I've got something better now," and the fact that that never actually happened just wound him up tighter and tighter because it was inevitable and it hung over him like some kind of sword of Damocles; and having a sword of Damocles hanging over you is a sure-fire way to take the joy out of everything, even incredibly good sex with the guy you love, so for Keith that entire first year was less than fun.

On the plus side, all his worrying about Lance and what it meant that they were now ten months into this and, despite all his expectations, Lance was still coming by at least once a week for sex, had done absolute wonders for the rest of his life, although he wasn't sure he liked what it said about him that he put his personal matters before his job. Not that losing his temper and snapping at Coran and Allura had been a bad thing, in the long run, but he probably shouldn't have shouted, "Are you people fucking _idiots_?"

"Wh-what?" Allura said, big-eyed and startled, and Coran huffed into his moustache and said, "Remember who you're talking to here, young man."

"Remember who—" Keith bit back the words he wanted to say and took a deep breath and closed his eyes to calm himself down. "It's been two-and-a-half years. When are you going to get it through your heads that you're not going to be getting any help from the Alliance? You're on your own – _we're_ on our own, and the sooner you realize that the better."

"You're here. You and your team. You're Alliance," Allura said, and Keith laughed, harsh and frustrated

"Yeah. We're here, but only by accident. We weren't given an assignment, a mission. As far as the Brass is concerned your conflict with Doom is an internal matter – you're not a member planet, you're not even an ally, and the Alliance has a pretty firm policy on not starting wars, which is what they'd be doing if they sent troops or ships to help you out. Face it, my team is all you're going to get, and we're probably going to be tried for desertion since, technically speaking, we've all entered into Arus' armed service without authorization."

"But isn't this what the Alliance does?" Allura said. "Wasn't it founded on freedom and dignity? And how can the Alliance stand idly by while the Doom Empire spits on the very ideals the Alliance holds dearest?"

"Because the Alliance doesn't want to get into a pissing contest with the Doom Empire and, quite frankly, people only care about atrocities when they're happening to them. Look Princess, I agree with you, I think the Alliance could do a hell of a lot more than five kids fresh from the Academy, but I'm not one of the guys calling the shots and you've got to face facts – we're all the Alliance help you're going to get."

"Okay," Allura said, slowly, a determined expression on her face. "Okay. So what do we need to do in order to get the Alliance to send us some help?"

"You need to – you're too passive. You've got this giant super-weapon and you're using it to crack nuts and open jars. You've got to – We need to be more aggressive. We've been spinning our wheels for two-and-a-half-years and all that's happened is I'm a man down and your people are no longer living in caves. Voltron needs to be _out there_. We can't just keep reacting. We've got to take the fight to them. If we can make this a war we can win, the Alliance will be more than happy to jump into bed with us."

"Voltron was – is – a defense construct," Coran said. "He won't work as a first-strike weapon."

"So we make a few modifications. I've got good people working for me; let me use them."

In all honesty, the moment had deserved more attention than he'd given it, because he knew, somewhere in the part of his brain that wasn't obsessing over the fact that he wasn't being ambushed by Lance on a daily basis and dragged off somewhere private for short, intense bursts of hot, dirty sex, this was a big thing he was asking of Allura and Coran. He was asking them to pervert a heroic legend, turn a planetary treasure into something less than what it was, and they deserved his full attention, not the bits of him that weren't debating whether or not he should come up with some kind of plan to make Lance into even more of a sex addict that he already was or to just accept that the break-up was inevitable and enjoy as much of his time with Lance as possible. And he probably should have done more than give Allura and Coran a curt nod when they agreed – with obvious reluctance – to allow him to monkey about with Voltron's parameters and capabilities.

Still, it was a start, and he was kind of annoyed that the stress ulcer he'd been developing over the past six months hadn't taken the hint and settled down. In point of fact, he was extremely pissed about the fact that when he went to tell Hunk that they had the green light to start running some hypotheticals on expanding Voltron's capabilities he hadn't gotten farther than, "Hey, Hunk" before he'd doubled over and vomited blood all over Hunk's shoes.

A Lance-induced stress ulcer, an armada parked on his doorstep and a sense of impending doom – everything was status quo as far as Keith was concerned. In hindsight, however, he probably should have told Hunk that the occasional bout of vomiting up blood was normal in his world because then he wouldn't be sitting at the little table in the castle's kitchen, sporting an erection caused by his goddamn Pavlovian response to chocolate chip cookies, and extremely embarrassed because in his mind throwing wood in front of Hunk was like throwing wood in front of his mother and he wasn't even going try to work his way through that thought process.

"Here," Hunk said and put a glass of milk in front of him.

"What's this?"

"Milk. For your ulcer."

"Look, Hunk, that's just an old wives tale."

"Just shut up and drink."

"Uh huh." Keith looked at the glass. "Thing is, I'm lactose intolerant."

"It's soy milk."

"Right. And by 'lactose intolerant' I mean I'm intolerant of anything that has the world 'milk' in it's name, and where the hell did you get soy beans?"

"I have my methods."

"Uh huh. Look, it's just an ulcer, I've had them before, it's no big deal. Besides, it wasn't like there was a lot of blood."

"Keith, when you're vomiting blood, a little or a lot – it doesn’t really matter. You're vomiting _blood_. That's not normal. Or good."

"I know, okay? But I don't think milk – soy or otherwise – is going to help with that." Keith sighed and pushed the glass away and tried not to notice that Hunk was staring at him in that half-lidded thoughtful way he had.

"You know what your problem is?" Hunk said.

"I've got a mechanic with frustrated maternal instincts?"

"You worry too much."

"Y'know, I don't know if you've noticed this, but there's a fucking armada—" Keith began, but Hunk smacked him on the back of his head and he stopped talking and settled for glaring.

"You worry about stupid stuff," Hunk said, with a solemnity that was entirely out of place, like he was delivering the secrets of the ages. "Stop fucking yourself up over Lance."

"Who says I'm— Ow. Dude. Seriously, stop smacking me. I'm pretty sure that I can court martial you for assaulting a superior officer."

"You could, but I'd win and then you'd feel stupid."

"Fine example of military discipline, my ass," Keith muttered and rubbed the back of his head.

Hunk sighed, sounding far more put-upon than he had any right to in Keith's opinion, and pulled out the chair across from Keith. He turned it around and sat down, crossing his arms over the top of the backrest and said, "Level with me here, Keith. I know you. I've been listening to you cry into your beer about Lance for years now. And now you've got Lance. And you're vomiting blood. So tell me. What's going on?"

"It's not just Lance," Keith said, because even if his plans in re: Lance had been utterly derailed before they could be properly railed at all, he was still trying to be less half-assed about everything, and that probably meant that he needed to stop lying to himself all the time. "I mean, okay, a large part of it's about Lance, but it's not all him."

"And?"

"And I've wanted this for a lot longer than I've been telling you about it, and I know it's not going to last, is all." He shrugged, and focused on a spot that was in Hunk's general direction. "So, y'know, I'm worrying about what's going to happen when Lance figures out that he doesn't really want me and this was just a mistake, and about how spectacularly I'll self-destruct when this thing with Lance ends, and it's given me an ulcer and it was really just shitty luck on your part that you happened to be there at exactly the wrong place and time."

Hunk frowned at him and Keith wished there was something other than milk in that glass because drinking its contents would have given him something to do.

"You're a fucking idiot," Hunk said at last. "Only you would take Lance jumping you in the hallways for sex as a sign that he has no real interest in you."

"It's just sex," Keith said. "And at some point, that's all going to end, and. I just. I don't deal well with this sort of thing."

"You're an idiot," Hunk said. "Drink your milk."

*

When Keith was five years old, his brother told him that he was a mistake.

He still hasn't quite gotten over that.

*

"Hey, can we reschedule?" Keith said to Lance after breakfast, and he wasn't counting the number of days they'd been doing this non-relationship thing because he'd promised Hunk he wouldn't do that, but if he had been doing that then he'd be able to tell anybody who asked that in the two years, seven months, and twelve days since he and Lance had started fucking on a regular basis, this was the first time he'd ever actually told Lance they couldn't have sex and he still wasn't sure how Lance was going to react to that.

"Sure," Lance said.

"It's just that I've got meetings all day," Keith said, "and I don't know how long they're going to run, and you know I'm no good after a day full of meetings. Plus, the Danaan coalition is here and I'm pretty sure they'd take offense if they knew I was blowing them off to go have sex with you."

"Keith, it's cool," Lance said.

"We can reschedule for tomorrow. Say, 9:30-ish?"

"We don't actually have to follow a schedule, you know. I was just kidding around."

"Yeah, but you bought me a day planner and everything," Keith said, and he thought that was that and everything was settled and he really should have known better because this was Lance, after all, so he shouldn't have been surprised to find Lance in his rooms when he finally escaped the meetings at some unforgivably late hour. He was, though – surprised, that is, because there Lance was in a place where Lance, theoretically, wasn't supposed to be.

Keith stood in the doorway and stared at Lance, who was doing the crossword in Keith's bed, the paper propped up against his knees, and all Keith could really think about was how he never should have given Lance the access key to his room.

"Lance."

"Hey, what's a nine letter word meaning 'script extras'?"

"Lance, I thought we rescheduled."

"We did."

"So what the hell are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you."

"Lance, we're not having sex tonight."

"I know."

"Okay." Keith closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead because he really didn't want to be dealing with this sort of thing right now. "Okay. So. I ask again. Why are you here?"

"You've got better sheets."

"What?"

"Your sheets. They're softer. Than mine, I mean."

"And?"

"And I like sleeping on soft sheets." Lance looked at him over the edge of the newspaper, and Keith wondered if maybe he'd fallen into a rabbit hole and was in Wonderland and didn't know it because the look Lance gave him was so very Lance – that peculiar combination of innocence and guile that meant that Lance was telling the truth – that Keith was forced to entertain the possibility that maybe Lance wasn't lying. Maybe Lance really wasn't here for sex – maybe he really did just want Keith's sheets. "You look like shit."

"Yeah. It's been a long day."

"Come on," Lance said, and he got up off the bed and his fingers left newsprint smudges on Keith's wrist when he grabbed it. "Come to bed."

A part of Keith was screaming that this was a trick, and he'd end up naked and fucked and then the headache that had been threatening all day would do a whole lot more than wave menacing signs, and it wouldn't be fun and he'd end up declaring war on someone tomorrow, entirely by accident of course, but the rest of him was mostly focused on the way Lance looked – ragged and unsexy in a pair ratty sweats and a tank-top of indeterminate color – and on the miles of bed stretching out before him so that he was undressed and in the bed before he knew what was happening. And then Lance was turning out the lights and crawling into bed with him and the smug voice in the back of his head that sounded too much like his brother said _told you so_ and he braced himself to inflict the kind of damage that would surely make this whole weird non-relationship end very, very quickly, but he was tired and if they had sex then his sheets would be sticky and he'd be sweaty and kind of gross and the bad, murderous feelings that welled up at the thought of having to drag his exhausted ass to the shower, which would definitely wake him up, and then back here where he'd have to strip his sheets was, at the current moment, definitely more powerful than any soft, fuzzy feelings he might have towards Lance.

Only Lance had apparently actually meant it when he said they wouldn't have sex tonight, because instead of sliding a hand under the elastic band on Keith's underwear and whispering dirty suggestions into Keith's ear, he threw a leg over Keith's hip, wrapped an arm around Keith's waist, did a weird and kind of uncomfortable semi-shimmy burrowing thing, sighed happily and began to breathe in the slow and slightly damp way he had that meant he was nearing sleep. No sex, not even a semblance of sex -- not that Keith wanted to have sex right now, far from it, but it was still unsettling to have Lance lying so close to him – hell, lying _on top_ of him – and to not be making with the grunting and the thrusting, a fact that was oddly disappointing in its own way.

"Just sleep," he said, and he felt Lance nod against the side of his neck.

"Yeah. Sleep," Lance said, and then he began snoring in Keith's ear.

*

There was a period of about ten months, somewhere during year four, when there was absolutely no sex whatsoever, largely because Lance was off with Sven's little rebel army subbing in for Rommelle who was busy nursing the small, squalling crown prince of Pollux whose name was either Snorri or Marcus Aquila, depending upon who you asked. No sex, not even phone sex because in order to contact anyone from whatever planet Sven was using as a base for that particular week, they had to bounce the signal through twenty-three different relay stations in order to keep it from being traced and even then there was always a risk of being discovered and, as Keith told Lance when he finally got fed up with Lance's pestering, "Do you want to be known forever as the guy who brought the entire Doom fleet down on our heads because you couldn't keep it in your pants?"

That little pronouncement had probably tacked on a few extra days to the Time Without Sex as Keith had started calling those ten months in the privacy of his head (largely because he was sure, mostly, that that was what Lance called it) because it made Lance sulky and sulky was one of the moods Lance could get in and not want any sex at all.

Not that Keith thought too much about the fact that they'd started the ten months with Lance pissed at him, or about how Lance was billions of light years away from him and consistently an idiot when it came to common sense and good judgment – there was always too much to do to spare more than a brief thought to the complications of his personal life and the fact that he apparently had a paranoid and jealous streak that he had previously known absolutely nothing about. War and death and blood and paperwork – that was all he really had time for, because things were really happening now. The universe was changing and Keith was riding that wave and he hoped he wasn't going to crash and drown.

And if sometimes late at night or in the odd moment of quiet stillness when he was between strategy sessions and he had only his thoughts to keep himself company, he thought about the fact that the longest Lance had ever gone without sex was three months (because Keith knew the truth about Pidge and knew it had been more than just a small bump on the long road of Lance's sex life) and that Sven was definitely a guy who had a carnal interest in Lance's ass and probably hadn't had sex since mid-way through Romelle's second trimester, and Sven was, really, the only guy Lance had ever loved, well. He'd always known the ending to this story, and he'd always known that the couple kissing as the curtain closed wouldn't include him. And he was, if not fine with that, then at least comfortable with his place in the saga of Lance and Sven, so he'd pretty much resigned himself to the fact that, really, this was the beginning of the end and it would only be a matter of time until he was left with nothing but a shattered shell of himself, a Lance shaped wound slowly growing instead of shrinking with time.

Still, he tried not to think about it too much, at least during those ten months that he worked until he passed out and dreamt of nothing but war, and when Sven came back two weeks before Lance did, he tried to pretend that everything was okay because, really, as far as he knew Lance and Sven really did spend ten months in cellars and ditches and dogfights and not tearing each others clothes off and going at it like sex-starved teenagers.

He probably would have done better with the whole "It's all in my head" thing if he hadn't had such a vivid imagination and if Sven hadn't looked quite so sexually satisfied.

Of course, running away from Sven, in a somewhat less than metaphorical way, was probably not the best idea in the world because Sven was still Sven and as much as he loathed Sven's guts at the moment Sven was still his first love and his best friend and that was why when Sven knocked on the doorframe of his study and said, "Come have a beer and a cig with me?" he'd shrugged and said, "Sure," and ended up on the battlements, cold beer in hand, and squinting at the setting sun.

"I didn't sleep with him," Sven said, and Keith choked on his mouthful of beer because this wasn't what they did, this whole talking about the problem thing. "I didn't sleep with him and he didn't offer. Just in case you were thinking that I did, or anything."

"I didn't say you did," Keith said, once he finished coughing, and maybe he should quit smoking because, yeah. His lungs were definitely not happy with him right now. Or maybe it was his heart.

"Well I didn't, and not just because Romelle would rip my balls off and make them into earrings." Sven took one last draw on his cigarette and threw the butt over the edge of the battlements. "So stop treating me like I did."

"I'm not."

"Yeah. Sure." Sven lit another cigarette. "'Coulda fooled me."

"Lance doesn't love me," Keith said, because he needed to explain this, to explain what he and Lance had and how, really, he didn't need care if Lance slept around or not because it wasn't like that.

"Uh huh. 'Cause, yeah, that'd explain why Lance spent the last ten months jerking off."

"No, I mean. It's just sex. This thing with Lance. We just have sex."

"But you love him."

"It's just sex."

"But you're in love."

"Leave me alone." Keith said, and he finished his beer and went back to reading boring memos about troop movements until he fell asleep somewhere on the dark side of dawn and woke up when Lance shook his shoulder and said, "Dude. That looks really uncomfortable."

Keith blinked, slowly, and when Lance smiled at him, his teeth were a yellow crescent set against something that was too long for stubble and too short for a beard.

"You're back."

"Yeah," Lance said, and he pulled Keith up from his chair and into an embrace and kissed him slow and lazy, like Sunday morning. "Man I missed you."

"Yeah," Keith said, hyper-aware of the solid bulge of Lance's erection trapped between them and the strange familiarity of Lance's body pressed against his own. "Me too."

 

*

One year before the end of the war, when it became clear that there was actually going to _be_ an end to this war, Keith woke up in a cold panic because something wasn't right, and after that extremely unpleasant incident on Aoglis II a few years ago Keith had learned to pay attention when his instincts were shouting that something wasn't right. Only this wasn't some planet deep in Doom territory and they weren't holed up deep underground with a rebel enclave – this was home, and this was his bed, and this was Lance snoring in his ear, and everything seemed to be exactly as it should be. Still, his instincts said something was wrong, so he pried Lance's fingers free from their death-grip on his hip and slid out of bed. Behind him, Lance grunted unhappily and the bedsprings creaked as he pushed himself up.

"'S morning already?"

"Go back to sleep."

"And miss this opportunity?" Lance said, his voice ragged and rough and full of sleep. He tugged on the bottom of Keith's boxers. "C'mon, you, me, awake, nothing to do – we haven't had sex in, like, three weeks."

"Ten minutes. Something feels off." He leaned down and kissed Lance, who had morning breath even though it wasn't technically morning, and Lance yawned into his mouth and let go of his underwear.

"I'll be waiting," he said, and he was snoring again – little whuffuling snorts that Keith would never admit to finding endearing – before Keith got to the door.

It took longer than ten minutes, of course, because he checked everything, from walking the battlements to reading the report logs to sneaking into Allura's room and making sure she was actually in her bed and not doing anything that was going to make the sky fall down on their heads tomorrow. It took a lot longer than ten minutes, actually, because nothing was wrong and he wouldn't accept that until Pidge, who was on the graveyard shift tonight, actually threatened to shove a complicated piece of equipment where the sun didn't shine.

"You've been hanging around with Hunk too much," Keith said, and he hoped his voice didn't sound as petulant as he thought it did. "Used to be, I had respect. Whatever happened to my respect? What happened to the salutes and the 'yes sirs' and 'no sirs'?"

"With all due respect, sir," Pidge said, "fuck off. Everything's fine."

"Fine, fine, but just so you know, any hope you had of getting a good performance review out of me? Completely and utterly shot."

And even that was normal, and as Keith headed back to his room and Lance he couldn't stop frowning because normal wasn't the way the world was supposed to be. His entire nervous system was on stand-by for a fight, and the fact that there wasn't a fight materializing was making him irritable and uncomfortable – tense and itchy in unscratchable places.

He'd actually undressed and crawled back into bed and stolen his pillow back from Lance before everything clicked and he realized that the thing that had woken him up in a cold sweat was the fact that, somewhere, somehow, he'd stopped being tense about the fact that Lance was in his bed. Somehow this – the snuffling noises, the heavy warmth of Lance's body, the artifacts of Lance's personality left scattered throughout his room – had become normal, accepted, integrated into his routine until he didn't think twice about the fact that they'd been having this non-relationship for nearly five years and at some point it had stopped being all about the sex and instead became something more. It was comfortable and quiet and as much about just lazing about on a Sunday morning as having sex in one of the Lions' cockpits. Somehow, it had become something that looked an awful lot like a relationship, and Keith should have been freaked out about that but somewhere in those five years he'd also lost the ability to freak out about the repercussions of having Lance in his bed; lost the ability to freak out about the fact that he didn't know what was going to happen to them when the war ended.

He was dealing with this, and that actually freaked him out for about five seconds because he hadn't realized he'd gotten that mature yet. But he had and he was and so he nudged Lance into something resembling consciousness and gave him a blowjob, partially because of the realization that he had somehow grown up to be a person who no longer got stress ulcers worrying about his sex life had filled him up with a golden energy that demanded release, but mostly because Lance was right and it had been three weeks since the two of them hadn't been too exhausted to do anything more than to make it as far as the bed before passing out.

Slow and sleepy and Keith really couldn't knock morning sex with Lance because Lance with bed-head and stubble was a nice sight in general and when you added in the slightly glazed, dopey smile he got after sex, well it was just a nice way to start a day.

"Hey," Lance said. His eyes were crinkled at the corners, and his walls were down and Keith had to look away from the glare of Lance's naked soul.

"Morning," Keith said, and he kissed the hollow of Lance's hip, and he was warm and sleepy and sure he was loved.

**Author's Note:**

> First, this takes place immediately after the events in "Infant". Second, the timeline got borked in this fic. Honestly, the Keith/Lance courtship probably should have taken place in a much shorter timeframe, but at the time I wrote this it didn't feel right to me to have Keith truly believe Lance was "his" in a space less than 5 years. That being said, I clearly need to write a piece set during this five year period to explain *why* Lance is as oblivious as he is about his feelings in "Overs" because, yeah. Even Lance isn't that much of an idiot.


End file.
